THE KHMER ROUGE ARRIVE son, Thong Bun, had left with Eang's mother, in the hope of finding a province where there was no fighting and where it would be safe to settle until the war had run its course. Once they had found such a place, Eang and Theap and the rest of the family would join them. By that morn- Ing, Thong Bun and his grand- mother had reached a village about twenty-five miles away, but the arrival of the Khmer Rouge in the province had dis- rupted communication among the villages, and there was no way for Thong Bun to send word to his parents of where he was. :: . F OR a week, Eang and Theap mostly stayed in their house. The market never opened. It was the dry season, and the skies were blue and cloudless, and it was hot all day. From her win- dow, Eang saw no one but sol- diers, raising dust as they passed. A few people collected theIr pos- sessions in bundles that they carrIed on their shoulders and tried to walk away from the village, but they were turned back by guards at the place where the road from the country arrived. A number of men who had retired from Lon Nol's Army lived in Svay Sisophon. When the Khmer Rouge an- nounced that everyone who had a weapon must deliver it to them, many of the ex- military men formed a line in the field that had been the marketplace and handed over rifles and pistols and boxes of ammunition, which the soldiers tossed on a pile. Some of the ex-military men were fearfiù of revenge. With the arrival of the soldiers, they had begun pretend- ing that they had always been civilians, and now they were afraid to turn in their weapons and risk being identified, so they buried the weapons in their yards or waited until darkness and threw them in the river; months later, when the soldiers ordered prisoners to begin cultivating land in the town, the prisoners turned up the guns with their plows. The round- up of weapons took nine or ten days, and once the soldiers had concluded that the vIllagers were no longer armed they dropped their pretense of friendliness. Over a loudspeaker one morning came the voice of a soldier calling every- få1 , --- - G' 55 ; : , ': (): <> , L' ^ h \ .....,., ----- ( \ -- . .. ".; . one in Eang's part of town to a meet- ing in the marketplace. The soldiers stood in the shade of a canopy strung between the beds of two trucks The people sat on the ground. They wore scarves and palm hats, and some un- furled black umbrellas. The soldiers told them that each person would be ex- pected to perform the job he had held under Lon Nol. Those who had occu- pied positions of statUs or authority- doctors, men in the military or the po- lIce, anyone with an education-were asked to sit, with their families, at the front of the gathering; these people, a soldier said, would be essential to the task of building the country again. Tricycle-taxi drivers and laborers who had bought shirts from Lon Nol's sol- diers as they fled, and hoped by wear- ing them to pass themselves off as more important than they were, took seats among them. Eang and Theap, with no hope of impersonating educated people, found seats at the back, with the farm- ers and fish sellers. The soldier said that everyone would have to leave the village for a while, so that the troops could search for weapons; when the search was finished, they could return. He told them that in the meantime they should go back to the towns where they were m If: .-". .:;.:::....::. ::.....::.. , : ., ( t r :,.... _ "' " " i . . '-- - .."..----- ---- / U'_ "}> o . born, and that there they should set about work in the fields to help restore the country. He ordered the people at the back to leave the meeting, and the soldiers began to form the others into ranks. It was said that they were to be taken to another part of the province and given work. Two of Eang's broth- ers were among them. One of the brothers sensed that catastrophe awaited them, and tried to leave with the farm- ers and the other unfortunates, but a soldier blocked his way. Eang and Theap felt that the plan- tation was too far to reach by walking, so they joined a group heading east. They had no idea of their destination; they had simply been told to travel ten kilometres. Eang put her daughters in the wagon that Theap had built to carry her porridge. She also put in it a few clothes and some photographs of her fa- ther and her mother and her brothers. All the money that she and Theap had went into a bag, and that also went into the wagon, along with all their pots and pans, and some blankets and pillows, and enough rice to last them the week that they expected to be gone. Theap brought his motorbike. Now and then in ditches by the edges of the road they saw corpses. Occasionally, someone rec-